The NBA’s public relations disaster with China is one of those unanticipated events that is both amusing and clarifying. The amusing part is easy. The people who run the NBA are the worst sorts of people, so watching them get slapped around by the Chinese government brings lots of pleasure. Seeing the Chinese carry on like hysterical girls is a lot of fun too. The paper-thin skin of the ChiComs is a reminder that despite their tough talk, they live in mortal fear of the society over whom they rule.

The clarifying part is the most important, as it reminds us that despite what our rulers tell us, countries still matter. China likes consuming product, but they like being Chinese more than they like watching the human flea circus that is the NBA. When the choice is between who they are and consuming product, the former is going to win. As John Derbyshire pointed out, the Chinese are focused on becoming a global power, not folding themselves into the bland nothingness of the global community.

Of course, what makes this so clear is that the NBA is a billion-dollar enterprise that throws its weight around America in the culture wars. When George Zimmerman shot the hoodlum Trayvon Martin, the NBA players took the side of the hoodlum. The players would wear hoodie sweatshirts like the hoodlum. When the Ferguson cop shot Michael Brown, the players came out against the cop. The league and its players drip with anti-white animus and no one in authority dares say anything about it.

In contrast, one unfortunate tweet and the NBA owners were crawling on their bellies, begging the ChiComs for mercy. Lebron James, the league’s biggest star, was seen volunteering to harvest organs from executed Chinese political prisoners. As Derbyshire pointed out, it was a display of raw power. The NBA will tell Donald Trump to take a hike, but they won’t dare get on the wrong side of the communists. The ChiComs have no fear of the human flea circus. They know who holds the power.

This incident gets to some eternal truths about human society. One of those is that power springs from identity. The man who is confident in who he is, will project power, regardless of his circumstances. This scales up very well. Societies that have a strong sense of identity, can punch well above their weight. You see this in Eastern Europe where countries like Poland and Hungary are successfully squaring off with the EU over immigration policy. The EU can’t stop the Poles from being Polish.

Of course, that strong identity is not enough. The people have to believe they have a shared destiny. They need a coherent narrative to explain how it is they are a people and why they have a future. It does not matter if that narrative is true. What people believe will always trump facts. That is another one of those eternal truths about humanity. The Chinese believe they are a people with a future, one where China dictates terms to the world. That’s what makes them so bold.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to the great chain of causality. The starting place for a human society is the people, the biology. Whatever the potential of the people is the potential of the nation. The Chinese are a smart, resourceful and resilient people, who have been around a long time. The reason China went from something close to feudalism in the middle of the last century to a global powerhouse today, is there is a lot of human capital in China. China has good biology.

The next link in the great chain of causality is culture and that’s something China has more than anyone. It probably has to do with the homogeneity. The Han are roughly 92% of the Chinese population. The other people are relegated to the fringe. When there is no need to accommodate differences, the culture can concentrate. Whatever the reason, Chinese culture is as strong as any on earth. So strong, in fact, it could endure the homicidal maniacs of the Cultural Revolution.

China is the great proof of concept. They have the biology right and they have the culture right, so they have been able to survive disastrous institutions, insane economics and homicidal politics. If you get the biology right and the culture right, you have a chance to get the rest of it right. There are no guarantees and China is proof of that as well. That’s the other side of it. If you get the biology right and the culture right, you can survive the mistakes made downstream in politics and economics.

Western globalists have had to lie to themselves about China, in order to square the fact that China is prospering despite rejecting Western liberal democracy. To accept China as she is would mean rejecting the great multicultural project. The looming conflict with China will drive that point home to the West and it may be a good thing in the end. Whether or not there is time for Western nations to pull out of their death spiral and get their biology right is unknown, but they will have the example of China.

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The term “dark age” came into popular usage among intellectuals during the 18th century, but the term itself was actually coined by Petrarch. He was an early Italian Renaissance scholar in the 14th century. It was originally used to describe a certain period of time, but eventually became synonymous with the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. The assumed lack of human progress, due to the lack of records and demographic decline, was a dark time for humanity.

The term began to fall out of usage as scholars gained a better understanding of the middle ages. The period described as dark, in terms of human accomplishment began to recede, eventually covering just the period immediately after Rome. Eventually the term fell out of fashion altogether, first because it was not terribly accurate and then because the usual suspects got involved. The image of dark versus light was seen as problematic, so now using the term is a microaggression.

That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality. The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.

In fact, everything about political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.

This twitter thread from last month is a useful example. It is primitive howling at the moon, but the source is someone claiming to be a scientist. Granted, anthropology is now just a dumping ground for girls, who could not find a husband, but the fact that such a thing exists in a college campus suggests a shadow is now hanging over at least part of the West. If you look at the twitter profile of that person, you’ll note she has her pronouns listed. These are the talismans of the modern academy.

Mx. Townsend is not some isolated example. She is a milder form of what is becoming quite common in academia. Cordelia Fine wrote a whole book denying that there are two sexes or even that sexes exist. She was carried around from campus to campus, celebrated as a great thinker. Her book is complete nonsense. It is now a race to see who can most completely deny observable reality about humans, in order to please some undefined spirits that will usher us into the age of equality.

It’s tempting to dismiss the madness we see in academia as trivial or temporary, but this has been going on for several generations now. Stephen J. Gould, for example, spent his life trying to shrink the stock of human knowledge. While his motivations can be debated, his purpose was not. This deliberate effort to pull down the shades and plunge the intellectual space into darkness has been going on for generations. We are just now seeing the shadows creep across the college campus.

A dark age is always imagined to be a period when the stock of human knowledge stagnates or even declines. Another way to think of a dark age is one in which the people are unable to manage the complexity bequeathed to them. As a result, society goes through a period of retrenchment. It devolves into something simpler that can be managed by the available human capital. A dark age is one in which the people rebuild the floor of their society, so future generations can build on it

Somewhere in the last century or maybe the prior century, people in the West began to lose the ability to control their institutions. By control, it should be understood to mean the knowledge of how they work and why they were created. It is one thing to know how to use the toilet. It is another thing to understand public sanitation and the reason it is a vital public service. People in the West no longer seem to know why their institutions exist or how they must be maintained in order to properly function.

That’s why the college campus is a good place to examine, when thinking about the crisis in the West. In theory, the people running the society of tomorrow are now being trained on the colleges of today. Yet, they are being taught things that are laughably false by people who are often suffering from mental illness. In other cases, they are taught by people who hate them and hate the West. A people who understood why these institutions were created would never have permitted this to happen.

There is another aspect of the term dark age. We often use it to describe a time when it is unacceptable to be curious about things. Everyone is forced into a conformity of thought and belief. It is associated with primitive superstition. Of course, the usual suspects always apply this to whites and Christians. Within living memory, they would portray Christians as closed-minded bigots, who were obsessed with stifling curiosity and free expression. The victims were always the usual suspects.

That’s just another part of the blood libel against the Occident and it is this blood libel that is steering the West into a dark age. In a frenzy to eradicate all that is white, they are stamping out what it means to be white. Since curiosity about the natural world is an implicitly Western trait, enforced conformity around a body of anti-knowledge is seen as the solution to whiteness. In this context, the dark age is not the result of a natural process or an accident of history, but the goal of the people who rule over us.

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If one were to summarize why Buckley-style conservatism failed, the clearest answer is that it stopped being conservative. The central tenets of conservatism are tradition, organic society, hierarchy, authority, property rights and prudence. In the Anglo-Saxon model, ordered liberty can also be included. The limits on authority are the logic of a fixed and orderly legal system. Probably the most concise explanation of American conservatism came from Russel Kirk seventy years ago.

Buckley conservatism, in contrast, was never deeply rooted in social philosophy and this was a deliberate act. The Buckleyites wanted a create a political movement that could compete with Progressives. In order to do that it meant winning elections and that meant providing a practical platform for governance. As a result, Buckley conservatism was always a compromise. In order to fashion a practical political platform, it meant deviating from conservative dogma as necessity required.

This lack of ideological moorings, however, led it to drift away from conservatism toward something that is better described as marketism. Libertarians see property as the key to individual liberty. All human rights derive from ownership of self and property is the fruit of labor, so absolute property rights safeguard individual liberty. Marketism, in contrast, views liberty as the unfettered right to trade property and labor. Therefore, liberty is maximized only through the free and unregulated marketplace.

In both cases, the definition of individual liberty is at odds with conservative conceptions of individual liberty, as well as the tenets of conservatism. The Right has always understood that a man could only be free within the context of society. To exist within a society, he must gain control of his passions and master himself. Customs and traditions, which habituated him to his duties as a member of society, also channeled his energies to that which served the good of his society.

This conception of ordered liberty, in which man can only be free within the context of his role in society, is the wellspring of conservative thought. Respect for hierarchy, for example, is not just an observation of man’s natural state, but an acceptance of the fundamental nature of human society. Similarly, the right of property can only be a coherent concept within a human society, not outside it. There can be no property rights without society, so property rights must ultimately serve the good of society.

For libertarians and market absolutists, any restraint on how you can dispose of your property or how you trade property with others is seen as a violation of your individual sovereignty. Inevitably, it means taking the side of the market when it bumps up against custom or tradition. It means siding with novelty that promises more market freedom, even when it undermines the organic institutions of society. Inevitably, conservatives became the defenders of the wrecking ball that destroyed American culture.

It’s why a Kevin Williamson could gleefully cheer for the destruction of small-town America and their customs, in the name of the free market. From his perspective, the limitations of localism are a gross violation of freedom, so destroying those local communities sets the residents free to maximize their economic utility. Buckley conservatism has drifted so far from its alleged starting position, it now stands in opposition to that which defined its alleged starting position.

This recent piece by David French is another example. In it, he turns conservatism on its head in order to promote marketism. The problems of college athletics, however you wish to frame them, are not the result of too little commercialism. Only a blithering idiot could come to such a conclusion. The trouble with college sports, and the college system as a whole, is it is now almost entirely free of the system of customs and traditions that created it. Higher education is a market that strives to be a racket.

David French, of course, has become the comical front man for Buckley conservatism over the last few years. His blend of sanctimonious finger wagging and principled mediocrity is the exaggerated version of the dissident critique of conventional conservatism. He is the clown nose of Conservative Inc. This is not solely due to his many personal defects. His embrace of unconditional marketism has led him to adopt an entirely transactional view of human existence.

There used to be a time when both sides of the Progressive orthodoxy understood the limits and liabilities of the marketplace. The Left would howl about consumerism at the expense of authenticity. The Right would point out the dangers inherent in an unfettered marketplace. Buckley famously said, “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” The modern conservative would not understand that juxtaposition. For him, the marketplace is supreme.

The underlying truth of radicalism is that it not only seeks to free men from the human condition, but it seeks to have them rise to the heavens and become gods. For the modern conservative, something similar has evolved. Whether it is a fetish for property or a fetish for markets, the Buckley conservatives imagine men breaking free of their constraints in order to become fully engaged market participants. For them, the paradise at the end is a shopping mall full of atomized strangers.

That’s why Buckley conservatism has failed. It is a primal call for a war of all against all, where atomized bugmen jostle to maximize their utility in the market. To consume product is the end point of existence. It is a crude and vulgar existence that celebrates man’s worst instincts at the expense of his nobler aspirations. What is on offer from so-called conservatives is a different type of hell than what is on offer from their partners on the Left, but it is still the same Progressive sandwich.

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It is generally assumed that liberal forms of government like parliamentary democracies and representative republics are middle-class in nature. That is, they require a strong and stable middle-class to come into existence, but they also foster the growth of a strong and stable middle-class. Because the bourgeois are conservative by nature, unwilling to risk their peace and prosperity, liberal democracies will tend to resist radical social experiments or take on great risks, like wars of conquest.

Of course, the history of popular government in the West strongly argues against those theoretical assertions. Not only has the West been racked by war, the peace that has existed for the last three generations is due to the imposition of empire. The Pax Americana is the result of the decades long stand-off with Bolshevik radicals and the final triumph of the American financial empire. In other words, the results of liberal democracy seem to be the opposite of what is predicted.

In fairness, one could argue that the last century of war and radicalism were part of the birthing pains of liberal democracy. Prior to the Great War, the West was still largely dominated by hereditary empires. Radicalism was the result of the prior age, born in the Industrial Revolution under the age of kings. The great competition for what would follow hereditary rule was the industrial wars and the subsequent ideological war, which was ultimately won by bourgeois liberal democracy.

This is the underlying assumption of Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man. The final triumph of the American empire of the Russian empire was not just the end of the Cold War. It was “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” He has since revised his opinion on the matter, in light of current ructions, but it is an argument you still hear from time to time.

It does not matter how you frame it, as the West is now dominated by liberal democracy and the bourgeois sensibilities that supposedly support it. Look around the political classes of the West and you will not find exceptional men. In fact, much of Europe is now run by frumpy middle-class women. What is remarkable about the ruling classes of the West is not their mediocrity, but their uniformity. Every politician says the same things and behaves the same way in office. It’s rule by automata.

The horror that has gripped Washington for the last three years is not about policy disputes with Donald Trump. It is mostly about style. Trump is garish and flamboyant in his words and deeds. He is not a man with bourgeois sensibilities. Instead, his tastes range toward the crude and the base. The bourgeois hatred of Trump is all about the aesthetic. He’s not one of them and he is not respectful of their thing, so they see him as a threat, a foreign object that must be expelled from the body politic.

Of course, this smug, bourgeois elitism is not limited to Trump. It has become an article of faith in Washington and throughout the ruling capitals of the West, that the hoi polloi is the enemy of democracy. The great caper to rig the 2016 presidential election was as much about thwarting the will of his voters as the man himself. Today, the political class in Washington is proudly undermining the basics of democratic order in the name of democracy. Something similar is happening to Boris Johnson in Britain.

Washington politics is now an endless squabble between mediocrities over trivial matters that distinguish one from the other. Because these people all fall within a very narrow band of general talent, what makes one stand apart from the other is little things that would normally be overlooked. In order to avoid that, they amplify these trivial issues and endlessly pick at one another’s small distinguishing features. The result is endless hairsplitting and backstabbing over persona slights and insults.

It turns out that bourgeois government looks a lot like everything else in bourgeois society, in that it is debate about how many mediocrities can dance on a pin. The reason for this is the great middle is not all that great. If we use the standard of IQ studies and say the average IQ in America is 100, that is the pole around which bourgeois society is twisted. The closer one gets to that number, the more representative of the whole. By definition, the middle-class is mediocre.

Further, the people who fall about one standard deviation above the middle are going to be the people who dominate the cognitive fields like law, polices, the media and the academy. That’s an even narrower band of people. Relative to one another, they are even more mediocre. Walk around a college campus and you are surrounded by people who never met a risk they did not take. The same is true in the political class. What’s remarkable is the near total lack of accomplishment outside of politics.

Critics of democracy generally point to the stupid getting access to the ballot as the main flaw of democratic systems. If for example, America only allowed males to vote, the political center would be somewhere to the right of Ted Cruz. If whites were the only vote, something similar would result. The argument from those very bad people who make such arguments is that we have 30% of the population not built to operate a Western style democracy. As a result, the system must fail.

Whatever truth there is to that, the reason for those conditions, for stupid people getting the vote and foreign people imported to vote, is the bourgeois political class, supposedly operating from middle-class sensibilities, made that choice. The decision to expand ballot access was not done by the king or the oligarchy. That was the work of middle-class people supporting members of their class in political office. The same can be said of open borders, where bourgeois demands for cheap labor rule the day.

The fact is, a precondition for a middle-class is an elite that will impose order and discipline that allows for the growth of a middle-class. The bourgeois was never intended to rule, rather they were built to serve. Put them in charge and you get what one would expect by putting the inmates in charge of the asylum. The resulting bedlam always requires a strong hand to restore order. This is why authoritarianism always seems to follow every foolish experiment with democratic rule.

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Critics of the modern age usually start from the assumption that the way in which the West is organized is fine. The problem is either the people, as in we have a rotten ruling class, or some set of defects that have been introduced into the system. The lament is often some form of “if we had only not done X.” This is usually accompanied by fingering some point in the recent past, like the 60’s. Recency bias has always been a major part of right-wing criticism of left-wing politics.

The underlying assumption is that liberal democracy will work just fine, if we can just get rid of those terrible liberals or go back and correct some mistake from the past. No one ever stops to wonder if maybe those nasty liberals and errors in judgement are a feature of liberal democracy, rather than a defect. Like Marxists or libertarians, the right has worked from the assumption that the right sort of citizen can be conjured or created, in order to make liberal democracy function as intended.

The truth is, the results we see around us, whether it is spasms of radical self-destruction or the suicidal flood of migrants, are all the natural result of liberal democracy. The troubles facing the West are not the result of some defect or shabby operators at the top. This is what you get from liberal democracy. As a wise once man said, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

The reason, of course, is the underlying assumption of democracy. That is, all men possess the same set of talents. After all, if every man’s say in the running of society is equal to the rest, if it carries the same weight at decision time, then all men must truly be equal. Otherwise, it is a system that deliberately vests the incompetent with the safety and security of others. In other words, the democrat must either be suicidal or sincerely believe men are of equal talent in this important task.

This is the fundamental faith of modern liberal democracy. It assumes and demands that all people are equally capable of making decisions about public policy. This is why noticing any differences in people has become a crime. To note that the retarded, for example, lack the necessary agency to care for themselves, raises the question of who else may lack the necessary qualities to care for themselves. If you cannot care for yourself, how can you be trusted to judge what is in the best interest of others?

This is why we see campaigns by radicals to expand the ballot to children, criminals and the mentally feeble. They couch their cause in fairness, but ultimately what is driving them is absolute egalitarianism. To acknowledge that people are not equally capable of being citizens, means debating where the line is drawn between those capable and those incapable of citizenship. This is a slippery slope that can only lead to the upending of the assumptions of modern liberal democracy.

That is where any alternative right, or alternative anything, must start, as it is the only way to arrive at an alternative outcome. Democracy starts and ends with egalitarianism, which is a binary issue. Either all men are equally capable of active participation is society or they are not. There is no middle ground. Democracy chooses the former and must relentlessly work to make it manifest. This is the root of the current madness that has gripped the West. It is a denial of biological reality.

This is the place to start when contemplating an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, whether it is in the narrow domain of politics or the larger one of culture. If all people are not the same in the particular sense, then it follows that all people are not the same in the general sense either. Since a “people” is the sum of the traits and abilities of the individual components, then what we observe as national character is the result of those individual differences peculiar to the people of that nation.

This brings us to the other face of democracy, which is universalism. Every democracy, from the Greeks to the present, assumes that the only legitimate and moral form of government is democracy. After all, if all men in the democracy are equal, it must mean all men in every society are equal. The social contract instantly becomes portable, applicable everywhere. Therefore, anything but liberal democracy is an immoral and inauthentic form of human organization.

The Peloponnesian War was a defensive struggle to resist the rapacious aggression of the Athenians, versus the natural hierarchy of the Spartans. The Great War that devastated Europe was ultimately to impose liberal democracy. The Second World War was a follow on to defend liberal democracy from fascism, which was followed by a 70 year war to defend it against Bolshevism. The history of democracy is a blood bath to prove it works everywhere for all people.

If what we observe is true, that people are not all the same in the wholesale or the retail level, then the question is why? The egalitarians point to various forms of magic like racism, the environment and the tides of history, but all of these collapse under the least bit of scrutiny. If any of these claims were true, we would see evidence of it in the West, where tens of millions of non-Europeans have been imported. Instead, the evidence revels the opposite. The differences in people are natural.

It is these natural differences in people that must be the starting place for any alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. That sounds easy, but it is the great struggle of this age. It not only means standing outside the moral order, it requires questioning everything we inherited from the Enlightenment. That is what will divide Right and Left in the coming age. On the one side will be the defenders of the Enlightenment, and its egalitarian pretensions, while on the other will be biological realists.

Just as the Enlightenment struggled to escape the cocoon of the Middle Ages, biological realism is struggling for life today. Even sober minded critics of liberal democracy struggle to embrace it. Paul Gottfried, in his first post back at the venerable paleocon outlet Chronicles, makes this point about himself. He can acknowledge some of the points from biological realists, but ultimately he prefers to hug the shore of nurture, rather than sail into the sea of nature.

Yoram Hazony, the Israeli philosopher, wrote a book in which he wrestled with biological reality in his defense of nationalism. Chapter after chapter relied on accurate observations about human diversity. In fact, the foundation of his argument is that nations are different, because they are composed of people, different from the people of other nations. Yet every time he reached the obvious end point of his logic, he pulled back and started flapping his arms and howling about equality.

Hazony and Gottfried are realists, when it comes to ethnicity. Hazony is an ethno-nationalist, while Gottfried is a paleo-conservative. Neither man is naive about the realities of the human condition. Both struggle, however, to transcend their conditioning, which shows how powerful the egalitarian ethic is in the West. It can overcome not only facts and reason, it can make you question your own observations. The project to build a metaphysics around biological reality, therefore, is daunting.

The human diversity we see all around us, the diversity of outcomes, within regions and nations, as well as between them, is not an accident of fate. It is not the result of some dark magic or a conspiracy of one people at the expense of another. These differences are rooted in our nature. Human biological diversity is a real thing that describes who we are as a species. Man is not man without this great diversity, because we are the result of a long natural process of regional trial and error.

Because biology is real, that means sex is real, race is real and ethnicity is real. These are all real things, coming into sharper focus every day through the study of the human genome. The long journey from the dawn of modern man to the first civilization was not the same for all people. The resulting nations of people reflect the long biological journey made by each people. It also represents the natural division of labor, for creating life and for living it, between the sexes and between the talents.

The Enlightenment was the software needed to take Western man out of the Middle Ages, through the age of sail and the industrial age, into the technological age. Like all legacy code, it has reached the end of its time. The demographic age, in which Western man finds himself a minority in a sea of diversity, all creeping up on his natural habitat, will require new code. We need a new moral framework and to do that means deposing the current one and everything that it entails.

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In the realm of economics, hidden taxes are considered the worst taxes, as they corrupt the relationship between the parties in a transaction. The hidden tax adds a third party to the transaction, which clouds the true cost from buyer and seller. This secret partner to the transaction is often the government. Fees in the supply chain, like energy taxes, for example, show up in the cost of the product or service, but they are not disclosed, so the true cost is hidden from both the seller and buyer in many cases.

In the social realm, there are hidden taxes that are not really hidden, as they are experienced every day, but no one thinks of them as taxes. For example, people living in Lagos on the Chesapeake are well aware of the tax. This is the daily cost of insulating yourself from crime and mayhem. It may be a direct tax like alarm systems or bars on the windows. It can also be an indirect tax, like the two hour commute from one part of the suburbs to another. Time is just another form of money.

There is also an emotional cost that comes with living around so much vibrancy. When you live in a place like Lagos, around the tax, you can never relax. Life in diverse areas is a constant struggle between two species that were never meant to occupy the same ecosystem. The fragile peace is a source of stress, because it is so fragile. You know that the cost of that peace is tolerating the endless inconveniences. The pale face just assumes maintaining the peace is his burden alone.

It is not just the anxiety of living in constant danger. The tax shows up in a million little ways in your daily life. If you go into a lunch place in certain parts of town, you can expect to see a local struggling to order from the menu. The inculcated sense of entitlement means they will waste time ordering odd things that slow up the whole process for everyone. In the grocery store, shoppers will pick checkout lines, based on the assumed tax in each option. Everyone tries to be a tax dodger.

Like real taxes, there is no way to avoid the tax. In a place like Lagos, it is everywhere and is just a part of the background radiation of the universe. One just learns to navigate around these burdens. You are only made aware of the tax when you go away to some tax haven and then return to Lagos. The most stressful day of vacation is the first day back. It’s like moving from black and white to color. For newcomers, the tax is not just disorienting, it can be terrifying, but then they acclimate.

Of course, the newest tax comes from open borders. Illegal immigration is fueled by the demand for cheap labor. All of those little brown guys riding leaf blowers are here because they are cheap. The price of the landscaping services may be lower, but the cost shows up in the emergency room or in the police blotter. This is a form of cost shifting that is, in effect, a hidden tax on the people using other services. The high cost of cheap labor is another hidden tax all of us are forced to pay.

The tax is not just a racial thing. The ultimate cause of the tax is Progressive whites, who are a tireless burden on everyone around them. When box wine auntie shows up for Thanksgiving dinner, everyone pays the price for tolerating her. The day is a little less enjoyable, a little less relaxed. In many cases, everyone is thankful that racist Uncle Bob did not strangle her at the table. Perhaps instead of thankful, everyone is disappointed. Again, everyone secretly wishes to be free of the tax.

That, of course, is the ultimate hidden tax. Every normal person has had to self-censor, hold their tongue around some Progressive goofball. Maybe it is at work, where fear of being canceled out of your job leads to self-censorship. Often, it is in daily life where everyone avoids certain topics around the liberal guy. Being polite, something that is supposed to be a gift you give to others, becomes another tax in your life. Every normal man has quietly thought about canceling the tax man in their life.

The tax is everywhere. Turn on the television to watch a sportsball game and you will be inundated with commercials for race mixing, homosexuals and girl power. What should be a few hours vegging out in front of the tube to watch men play a game, quickly turns into an aggravation that saps your strength. TV ratings have declined for sports, because for many normal people, the tax is now exceeding the benefit. Staring blankly at the wall is more relaxing than another lecture on girl power.

This is the massive hidden tax on normal people. The price of tolerating Progressive lunatics is the stress of crumbling community, the irritation of endless propaganda and the bitterness than comes with self-censorship. Everyone’s life is diminished because a small group of people impose a heavy tax burden on the rest of us. The rise of dissident politics is not a reaction to Progressive lunacy, so much as it is the result of carrying the hidden tax burden. Normal white men are tired of paying the damned tax.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The cancer eating away at the modern West is a lack of authority to which people can point to judge public policy, public debate on those polices, as well as the reactions to those policies and debates. As a result, debate has degraded into various camps striking poses, usually by signaling their unhappiness with the pose of other camps in the public sphere. The lack of an agreed upon authority means there is no way to judge the merits of any claim. Instead, it leaves force to resolve disputes.

A good recent example is the neocon opposition to Trump. These people are entirely defined by their hysterical reaction to Trump. There is no substantive issue around which they base their opposition. They are not pointing to ideological authority, tradition or even rules within the party. Their opposition to Trump rests on no authority other than their emotional reaction. That’s not an appeal to authority. It is a tantrum, the sort of thing you expect from toddlers. It is also the norm in the public space.

Now, there are two types of authority. One rises from objective knowledge accumulated over time about the natural world. An authority on engineering is someone, who has been trained as an engineer. His credentials are determined by meeting a set of objective criteria, like engineering exams, but also by remaining in good standing with other engineers. The same is true of all areas of expertise. These are the authorities on what is or what is not empirically true about their area of expertise.

In this regard, the West is in surplus. No matter the specialty, you can find someone who knows the material and can explain what is known about the topic. If you have an interest in statistics, you can find books written for every level of reader. You can find on-line courses covering just about any bit of knowledge you seek. If you have a desire to read Homer in the original, you can take on-line courses in ancient Greek. When it comes to what is factually true about the world, we have a surplus.

Where there is a shortage is in the area of what ought to be. What is true in the world is a very different thing than what ought to be true. What is true does not rely on a human authority to make it true. It does not need a supernatural authority to validate it. Two plus two will always be four as long as the universe exists. What ought to be true, however, relies on people, either as the authority or the voice of authority. This is the basis of moral codes, hierarchy, dissent and the collective action of society.

For most of Western history, religion was the authority upon which society relied to determine what ought to be. In the early Middle Ages, there was a great debate about the nature of that authority. That finally was settled and the Catholic Church was the worldly manifestation of that authority. After the Reformation, that authority was eroded, but replaced with Scripture as the source of authority. The story of the West, until the Industrial Age, was the story of Christian authority over man.

Of course, Christianity is a relatively new thing, so there have been other sources of authority in the West. The authority of blood is a universal. The great men of a people rise to the top of society. Their descendants, having inherited their great qualities, are assumed to be a source of authority. The king may not have done anything other than be born to the right father, but he has the magic blood. If it turns out that it did not take or the magic has lost its power, someone new must come along.

That’s where tradition fills in the gaps. The king’s heir may be less than the king, but the institutions that rose up around the king are now invested with authority. The reason the heir should be king, the reason he and no one else ought to have final authority, is this is how it has always been done. Tradition is probably the most powerful source of authority, as it assumes the is, as well as the ought. The custom, through trial and error, is proven to be the best, so it ought to be maintained.

In the current age, normal religion has been sidelined, not only as a source of authority, but as a legitimate part of public discourse. Fifty years ago, a public discussion of morality would have had representatives of various faiths to discuss what ought to be according their religions. A century ago those representatives would have provided authority for the current morality. Today, no public debate about moral issues, about what ought to be, includes religion, much less priests or theologians.

Tradition, of course, is by default eliminated from consideration. Much of what is passed off as public discourse is really a debate about how best to tear down the remaining traditions of society. The entirety of Progressive thought can be symbolized by the toppling over of statues on the college campus. The only thing they insist ought to be true is that truth itself must be overturned. Progressive morality, such as it is, is both the negation of moral truth and the denial of objective reality.

A world without authority, especially an agreed upon authority, is anarchy, but humans naturally retreat from anarchy. This is because anarchism is just mob rule. The ideal of anarchism is the mob mutually and magically agreeing to not murder one another, while the reality of it is the mob demanding authority to bring order. It is why democracy, which is just mob rule, is always a transition state. It is the period between the respect for natural, hierarchical authority and authoritarianism.

An example of this from history is the slow collapse of the Western Roman Empire, first into constant warfare, then into chaos and finally into the anarchy of local authority in the early medieval period. The end of the republic was not the end of a natural authority in Rome. The rulers still had to respect the gods and traditions. It is when those sources of authority collapsed that the end was clear for the Empire. The subsequent rise of the West was the rise of authority, Christian authority.

The modern West is undergoing the same sort of collapse of authority. Christianity, like the pagan faiths of the ancient world, has receded to the fringe. Tradition and hierarchy has given way to mob rule and force. What’s missing from the analogy is a new religion that provides a coherent order to the gathering chaos. Progressivism is an anti-religion, in that does not provide order to the natural world. Instead it preaches a denial of order and the denial of reason. It’s a primitive revolt against the natural order.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!